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‘My children’

22 December 2012

I know: you wait for ages for blog posts mentioning Poems on the Underground, and then two come along more or less at once.

But I was tidying up a bit ahead of Christmas and found a slim volume called World Poems on the Underground, published as part of London 2012’s cultural festival and given to Tube passengers. Don’t let anyone tell you that there aren’t compensations for travelling on Europe’s most expensive transit system. (That’s English irony, before I get any comments.)

Anyway, the booklet contains one of my favourite Poems on the Undergound, one that I’d transcribed when I first saw it, by the Kurdish poet Choman Hardi, who now lives in London.

My Children

I can hear them talking, my children
fluent English and broken Kurdish.

And whenever I disagree with them
they will comfort each other by saying:
Don’t worry about mum, she’s Kurdish.

Will I be the foreigner in my own home?

Choman Hardi

It’s from her collection Life For Us, published by the essential Bloodaxe Books. There’s an excellent interview with Hardi by Benjamin Morris at Textualities.

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This entry was posted on 22 December 2012 at 1:06 pm and is filed under poetry.